The summer I graduated, Danny came back from the war. I remember driving around Peoria with him and Jackie, singing "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier" and feeling the immediate shame.
We were driving to Home Depot.
We got there, and he was sitting on a glider, staring off. Jackie was saying something, there were birds flying around the ceiling, trapped in the warehouse. All I could do was look at him and wonder where he was.
We knew that he had changed. We could feel it. It was like walking on eggshells, and pretending that none of us had felt the terror of gunfire and roadside bombs.
But my grandfather and I sat next to each other at a bonfire one night, and he held my hand because I was weeping. He started to weep with me, even though we were broken in two different ways.
He wept for Dan and how you can't come back with the same innocence. I wept because I felt I was shell of a person, and that you weren't supposed to go into the beginning of real life feeling like you were hollow inside.

We've since been healed, the three of us in different ways, although my grandfather is blind now, and my heart doesn't beat the same way because of what the last three years have done to it. But I think what I mean is that I miss the Midwest.
The holiness of empty fields and eternal sunshine.
The roots you put down one time, and seeing that they still give you a foundation later on.
The only place you ever found unconditional love.

Yeah, the first time you met Jesus.